by Adam Holt
“No, I like your luggage,” she said. “No apology needed. If I were back on Earth, I would be stressing about our group project. I’d rather be stressing about, you know, real stuff.”
“Europa is about as real as it gets,” I said. “We’ve got a lot to figure out.” Europa. That itchy brain feeling returned.
“Huh,” Janice said, “I wonder what kind of story they would tell if we had not named their moon Europa. I mean, what if we called it Saturn Moon Number Four? They wouldn’t have much of a story to tell. They wouldn’t be talking about Zeus or the ‘Chosen of the Sacred.’”
The itch intensified. Then it disappeared, like it had never been there. Europa. I propped myself up in bed.
“Wait. Who really named Europa?”
“Galileo did. He named all the Galilean moons.” Janice scrunched her nose at me. She didn’t understand.
“No, what if the Ascendant chose the name? You know, whispered it in Galileo’s ear? How long have they had influence on Earth? They might have planned all of this centuries ago. They’ve just been waiting, watching and waiting, for the right time to attack. They watched us built the Pyramids, the Great Wall, the Coliseum, the Statue of Liberty, the first rocket, the first space station. Stars, maybe they even helped.”
“Bangers,” said Janice. “Maybe they did plan this for ages. Why would they wait so long to take our planet though?”
A picture flashed into my mind–the Lord Ascendant. I had only seen him once, but I remembered him perfectly. His cruel gaze, his face swarming with sea creatures, seated on a throne.
“I think I know why, Janice. Maybe they finally found the Chosen of the Sacred.”
FINAL DEBRIEF
The next morning my dad woke us up early and gathered us around the star map for the mission debriefing. Sunjay looked peaked but was alive and eating as usual. I was excited to tell Dad about Europa but would have to wait. My dad took us on a virtual tour of the next few days using the star map.
“We’ll do an orbital transfer around Jupiter before we land. We have to decelerate. That gives us a fly-by of our destination. There’s Europa.”
Stars, it was gorgeous even from a distance. We weren’t close enough to see the surface features, but it was a stunning blue-white moon criss crossed by blood-red lines. Or linea, as Little Bacon pointed out.
The moon was cool, but the planet beside it was impressive. Jupiter. King of the planets. Its surface smeared with browns, tans, off-whites, and blue. And red. A great red spot stared at us from the starmap.
“It’s a storm,” my dad explained. “You could fit 2-3 Earths inside it. That storm has raged for over four centuries, scientists think. Before humans invented airplanes, cars, computers, or androids, that storm was spinning.”
“That’s seriously bad weather for a long time,” I said. “You know what else has been bad and staring at Earth for a long time?” Janice motioned for me to wait. I was dying to tell him about the myth.
“At any rate, Jupiter will fill the sky of Europa from horizon to horizon. It will be Europa’s main source of light—reflected from the sun, of course. But enough about astronomy for now. We have a mission to discuss.” My dad kept it short and sweet.
Two goals: assess the Ascendant and save Tabitha.
Two methods: Stealth—“We avoid contact with the Ascendant at all cost.” Camouflage—“If stealth is impossible, we find ways to blend in among them.”
“But they’re tattooed all over,” said Sunjay, waiting for my dad to answer. “You mean, we might get tattooed? My dad would kill me!”
“Your dad won’t kill you, Sunjay, but the Ascendant might,” my dad said. “Keep that in mind.”
“He’ll probably ground your tattooed butt though,” Buckshot said.
“Now, our weakness: we have no idea how the Ascendant organize themselves. Researchers have long believed that oceans are under the icy crust of Europa. We will see. The Ascendant must be an ocean-faring people, but what will the Chaos look like. We don’t know.”
“The death smoothie is full of fish and seaweed,” blurted out Sunjay.
“Er, thank you, Sunjay,” my dad said. “I was thinking of the Lord Ascendant tattoos—most feature ocean creatures. Monstrous ones.”
“Yeah, about him,” I said. “Janice and I have something.” We popped on the music player and listened to the story of Europa together. Then we explained our theory. My dad and Buckshot nodded in agreement.
“So you think they somehow named Europa and used the myth to explain their existence?” my dad said. “That’s possible. And if the Lord Ascendant is the Chosen of the Sacred? That’s trouble. That would make him like a god-king. His followers might worship him.”
“Sounds like Hitler to me,” said Buckshot. “Mike, if that’s the case, we need to take him out. We take his life and we may be able to end this whole thing before it starts.”
“Let’s stick to our goals,” my dad said. “This is a recon and rescue mission. Assassinating an alien god-king may not be as easy as it – well, it sounds impossible.”
Buckshot shrugged. Hard to argue with that point, I guess. My dad continued.
“Now, one last thing: our advantages.”
“We have some?” I asked. “Like what? We’re weaker and outnumbered? I have powers that I can’t use?”
“Don’t think like that, Tully,” he said. “We are weaker and outnumbered. This cannot blind us to our greatest strength.”
“What strength?” I asked.
My dad pulled up the universe map, then swept it aside with one hand. In the middle of the room appeared a man’s face—beady black eyes, high forehead, and a small, tense mouth. A video message from Gallant Trackman. I almost threw a punch at the air in front of me. He sucked air between his teeth and said the following:
AWAY TEAM BETA –
WE HAVE YOU NEAR SPACE ALLIANCE HOUSTON.
INITIATE DESTRUCTION SEQUENCE.
YOU MUST NOT BE CAPTURED ALIVE.
“I found a number of these short messages,” my dad said. “They tell of Trackman’s plan to kill Tully and recapture the Device, but we all know, Trackman lost communication with this ship. You’ll remember that Dr. C destroyed the tracking device, too. Trackman will assume that his men followed orders. Either that or the Space Alliance destroyed the ship.”
“Ain’t that something?” asked Buckshot.
“Yes, it is. We are unexpected and invisible. We can arrive, blend in, and complete our mission before the Ascendant know that we were ever there.”
“Oh, we’re like ninjas,” Sunjay said.
“We’re like ninjas,” said my dad.
“We just need swords and throwing stars and all black outfits and maybe—”
Before Sunjay could really get going, a man’s voice interrupted him, saying something in Greek. We all froze. Two beeps. Another two beeps.
“What’s this all about?” I said.
Then an image flickered into the middle of the room. Before it could take shape, my dad grabbed Sunjay and Janice, Buckshot grabbed me, and the five of us hurled ourselves downstairs. We landed in a pile at the base of the ladder. My dad held a finger to his lips. Like we didn’t get the message, I thought.
Above us a deep voice spoke in garbled Greek. Janice pulled out her holophone and hit record. Genius, I thought. My dad motioned for her to hold it higher in the stairwell to catch every word that scraped across his vocal chords. The voice repeated something over and over, and then finally fell silent. My dad pointed to his eyes, then pointed to Janice to take a look on the Flight Deck. She gave us the okay sign, but my dad kept us quiet. He pointed to the holophone. Translate, he whispered to her. Janice pressed play. The volume blared for a split second before Janice turned it down to a whisper.
“Ship of unknown make, this is Europa Command. Please identify. Identify. Ship of unknown make. Please state your identity and location.” Then another voice faintly at the end, in the background. “It is just another chun
k of the Lion’s Mane floating in space. She hardly made it back to base after the explosions of the Earther commander. A curse upon him and his son! Do not concern yourself with that space junk.” We all took a collective breath. Maybe we were not as invisible as we hoped.
“Ready or not, the space ninjas are coming for you,” said Buckshot. He sounded so sure of himself. I felt relieved, but there was a twist in the pit of my stomach.
PART THREE: “WHEN YOU DESCEND UPON THE CHAOS”
LANDING
Two weeks. Four hundred million miles.
It was time to land on Europa, even though I wasn’t ready. I was unsure of myself. My powers. Would the Sacred wake up? Would it come back to me when I needed it? Could I even use it correctly? I was used to being unsure, but about the world around me. Not about myself. Against all that self-doubt I had my mom’s words, my dad’s hopes, and the Sacred’s advice. She knew you were meant for this. Something bigger is guiding us. Fight, but do not hate.
I repeated these thoughts to myself over and over as we double-checked our spacesuits, gripped our black staffs, and watched Europa grow larger and closer on the universe map. The names of surface features appeared. Delphi Flexus, Conamara Chaos, the Callanish, Thrace Macula. All were written in Greek on the starmap, but they were just as foreign in any language.
No signs of life, but we didn’t expect any. As we descended the surface features became clearer. Europa looked like a flawed marble. Large portions shown in pure white, so pure that it looked blue. But then massive veins of red ran across other parts, like fingernail scratches on skin. Lenticulae, Janice called them. She had trained us well: I knew the planet’s topography and recognized, in the distance, a wide plain as smooth as an ice rink.
“There,” I said. We grew silent. On the horizon we saw a flat, a wide plane of white ice crossed by no linea at all. It looked like an endless ice-skating rink. The Rathmore Chaos. It was a weird name. Underneath that jaggy, lumpy mess of ice, scientists believed that there was an ocean, slushing around in a mix of ice and water. My throat tightened and fists clenched. They were close to the truth. Below the surface was a city, and in that city a warlike alien race was plotting our downfall. And holding Tabitha hostage. And they weren’t going to get away with it.
Upon seeing the Rathmore Chaos, my dad swiftly dropped the Mini-Mane toward the surface and looked for a landing spot. Close enough to walk—or swim or who knows what. Far enough not to be detected, we hoped.
Spacesuits. We put them on hours ago and double checked to make sure that every seal was now airtight. “Final buddy checks,” my dad said. “No loose connections.” I checked over my landing suit and then Sunjay’s: an Ascendant suit, purple and black, form fitted. Then the helmets came on. Purple and black with a gold visor. Sunjay checked Janice’s suit three times until she looked annoyed. I didn’t blame him. There was only a trace of atmosphere on Europa, and the temperature was cold enough to freeze skin within seconds.
The five of us looked intimidating, just a lot smaller than the Ascendant who usually wore our suits.
The Mini-Mane shrunk back to “clown car” mode on our landing approach. We slowed down and touched down on a leveled icy plain. Then the wall became a walkway, and we slowly stepped out into a field of penitentes, spikes of ice that jutted out of the ground, some as small as lampposts and others as tall as the flagpoles in front of our school, most of them white, some shot through with blue, red, and black streaks. In the sky, the light from Jupiter provided a soft white light on the penitentes’ jagged edges. The sun was a brilliant pinpoint in the distance.
“To me,” my dad said. “Sound off.”
We all responded with our codenames: Spaceboy, Zaxon, Carpool, Shuckbot, White Knight. Good thinking, Dad. Tully Harper probably isn’t the best name to say over an open connection on an alien planet. Actually, it was safest not to talk at all. He signaled us forward. We started our trek toward Rathmore.
Space was fun, but arriving on Europa was spectacular. I couldn’t stop smiling. We skipped across the icy plain because skipping is awesome. It’s also the most efficient way to move in low gravity. I’ve never felt so strong in my life. My legs were supercharged, and my arms floated beside me. We bounded along the surface, dodging penitentes, trying to stay close to the ground, but that wasn’t easy. I weighed less than twenty pounds. One good push and I was shooting ten feet high and twenty feet forward. When we came to our first obstacle, an icy cliff wall, my dad pointed up. We grasped hands, he gave us a “3-2-1,” and we leaped thirty feet into the air. We landed on target in almost perfect unison and kept moving.
Not everything went so smoothly. At one point I fell on my face and could not stand. I wasn’t injured or anything. My brain just couldn’t make sense of what happened. We come from the Earth, and our brains fully expected us to spend our lives there. They weren’t ready for .1335G. I could picture my brain floating around in my head, saying, “Look, Tully, you’re the one that wanted to land on this moon. You figure out how to get up!” Thanks, brain voice. My arms and legs didn’t have any better ideas. They could not push up with the right amount of direction and force to make me vertical again. It was embarrassing, frustrating, and when Buckshot finally pulled me to my feet, my body instantly remembered what to do. Most of us had a few of these “gravity brain farts.” That’s what Buckshot called them.
We tried different methods for moving. Running up and down the penitentes was slower because each step needed to be planned on the bumpy parts. Jumping from the peak of one penitente to another worked better. We made those jumps one at a time. Jumping half a football field was difficult to judge. Most of us overshot the first few jumps. My dad usually stuck the landings so we watched his example. If we overshot, he could tackle us to the ground before we slid into an icy canyon.
I realized that all of this fun had a purpose – after an hour, we felt better oriented and more ready for the mission at hand. Adapt or die, I heard someone once say. I’ll take adaptation any day.
We were having so much fun running and jumping that we hardly took the time to look up. Above us, Jupiter filled almost the entire sky. Europa circles Jupiter every 85 hours, which is blindingly fast compared to most other moons. If you looked up once and then looked up again five minutes later, you could see something new. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot came into view—a rust-colored oval eye. That storm began before the car, the plane, or the spaceship. I could have lain down and watched it rage for hours. If only our mission was as simple as staring at the sky.
All around us in the thin air, microscopic bits of ice floated toward the surface, twinkling in the cold light. Where did those come from? I wondered.
The canyon leaps gave me the biggest rush. We had no idea what was in those black crevasses, and I held my breath every time I jumped across them. This wasn’t a routine yet, but my mind began to wander after one of those jumps. I watched the ice crystals accumulate on my glove. All those flecks mesmerized me, shined with the light of Jupiter and the sun. I never look at snow like this, I thought. What’s different about this stuff?
I looked back across the canyon to see if everyone else was on track. My dad and Sunjay stood beside me, and we waited on the other side for Janice and Buckshot. My dad gave me a thumbs-up. All systems go. But then…
Whooosh! It wasn’t a sound. It was a feeling beneath my feet. The ground shuddered and knocked me to my knees. It felt like the world’s largest toilet flushed and I was standing on the seat.
An enormous geyser of water spouted into the Europan air. Since the air was so cold, it froze into chunks of ice almost immediately, flying into the sky with no sign of slowing down. On the edge of that geyser, a black speck headed into the sky as well.
Janice.
She had jumped at just the wrong time. She didn’t catch the full impact, just enough to blow her up and sideways. She spun wildly through the air, halfway frozen in a chunk of ice with her free arm and leg flailing wildly.
“No, no,
no!” she yelled into her intercom. “I’m dizzy. Something hurts. What do I do?”
The three of us leaped into action. We had to move, but what could we do for her? My dad grabbed my arm and we followed below her. We heard Buckshot, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“Carpool, listen to me. Five deep breaths,” said Buckshot, still on the other side of the geyser. “Long and slow. You’re going to be okay. You got this. We got you.”
“No, no, no, no…”
“Carpool, get with me here. Slow breaths. Slow.”
The no’s stopped. I could hear her breaths and almost feel her inhalation.
“Okay, good. Now find a spot on the ground and focus on it. Relax. You’re gonna be fine. Breathe, honey. Breathe.”
She stopped flailing as she flew overhead, her body twirling, her right arm encased in ice, her gold visor trying to fix on a point on the ground, like an ice skater in the middle of her final spin.
We bounded from penitente to penitente chasing Janice. Whoosh. Another geyser erupted in front of us. Then another. My dad zigzagged his way through the minefield of geysers and penitentes. Sunjay and I followed, our eyes darting between Dad, Janice, exploding ice chunks, and the ground. Buckshot kept talking to her, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly his shadow appeared on the ground. Buckshot had taken a straight route through the geysers, risking everything to catch up to Janice. The risk paid off. He landed on a towering penitente high above us, planted both feet, and took a monstrous standing broad jump that shot him over our heads.
Janice seemed to have peaked hundreds of feet in the air. She could feel it.
“I’m falling. No, the ground. No!”
“Buck, you’ve got to catch her. That ice won’t break on impact.”
“Carpool, get with me,” said Buckshot. “Keep breathing. I’m coming.”
In front of us, the field of penitentes thinned out into a clearing. More geysers opened behind us, but none in front. Janice falling. Eighty feet. Sixty feet. She would land hard and skid to a stop. What would that do to her arm? If what my dad said was true, her arm would break before the ice would. I held out my hand, trying to summon some of my powers. Nothing. Too many distractions. No way to focus. Buckshot rushing. All of us following. Janice falling, falling still.